Proving Nothing
by Cassend
Summary: Post RE5- The BSAA has collapsed and their ruins are clawing to stay alive. With the economy shattered and the world on the brink of global panic, there's nothing to prove but the will to live.


_Thank you to my beautiful and amaaaaziiing homies for reading and picking through this for me. Thelexhex, CannibalCobra, and Cjjs, plus some SLT, why thank ya. You guys are badass and a half. I WILL MANAGE THIS. Charlie Clouser's Oven from SAW is AWESOME sountrack to listen to to this, I swear.  
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**Proving Nothing**

_-November-_

-1-

He pulls on the collar of his shirt and fumbles with the receiver of the hotel phone, attempting to tie dress shoes and talk at the same time. He swears and his roommate chuckles. It earns her an invisible glare (which does absolutely nothing).

"So you're a special agent and you can't even get your fucking clothes on?" she says, and he groans, picking at the impossible laces, untying a nasty black knot.

"They're shoes, not clothes." He mutters, disgruntled and uneasy. "Shoes aside-"

"If you can get them on-" she adds, and he waits, quietly. "Alright, sorry, go on."

He clears his throat as he manages to slip the shoe onto his foot. "Shoes aside- do you want to drive to the funeral, or should I?"

There's a quiet moment over the phone as the mood abruptly suffocates itself, sinking down into something black and thick. He could picture the unhappy expression on her face, humorless and grim. It was on everyone's faces. She's really quiet he considers saying something or putting it off, but he shakes his head and waits.

"You can drive, Leon. You're better with that shit." She says. The words feel heavier and sound like he felt. A steady drum of static spikes into the reciever and he winces, hearing the clomp of her feet muted amongst it.

"Alright." He says, perhaps a little later than usual. His lonely hotel room fills up with the eerie quiet and he stands to break it, pacing. "Do you mind mailing my card while you're in town today?"

The static spikes again and the characteristic beeping answered his question and he sighs, defeated as the call drops. He hangs the receiver back onto its cradle and is left in that uncomfortable, lonely silence. It's rather hard to take a room like this, with the ghost of a friend's memory in his thoughts.

He brushes the sand-colored bangs from his eyes, cursing them in their entirety, and for the millionth time wishes he was less nervous about what exactly was going to happen tonight. He wishes that he didn't have so much on his mind, that this would be on better terms, but these are complete fantasies.

He grabs his jacket, soft brown leather, and pulls it over his shoulders, hoping that the rain would hold up until he got to the restaurant. By the looks of things, a menacingly black city sky, that hope was farfetched.

The cheap phone in his pocket buzzes, a blocked number, and he flips it open. He sets his jaw and nods as if _she_ could see him through the text.

_ 'I'm here.'_

He hurries out into the city streets and throws it into the nearest dumpster he can find.

-1-

It's 2015 and she's got her twisted fingers in uncharacteristic knots on the fine diner table. She wants to say something to the man across from her, anything to get that little caustic smile from him, but things are _that_ bad, and she knows he wouldn't smile, not today.

"Claire…" she repeats back to him. She knows who it is. She knows enough about the woman to feel a slice of envy for her. Typically she expects everything, but she doesn't expect the news from his mouth, and said with a swallow he confirms it.

"-Dead. _The_ _Flu_."

He's struck so hard that he flinches at the admission, and she shakes her head. It's the reality of things washing over him in waves, ripples, drops. She wondered if he had cried over it in that moment, that first realization that his friend was a corpse and the final nail into his great collapse.

"I'm sorry." She mutters.

"No. No you're not, Ada."

It's heartbreaking, or perhaps more will-crippling than anything to hear the tone of his voice. It's everything the world is hoping for, drowning. It's the quiet tone of the defeated man, the broken thing, and there's nothing she can say to him to make it right. She's not sorry for his friend, she's sorry for him.

She traces the creases of her thumbs, the picture perfect lines of red polish on her nails, and pretends to look out the rain-spattered window beside her. The street is quiet tonight, not that anyone would be up at this ungodly hour. Stragglers pass by the handful every so often, clawing their way to shelter from the goddamn storm.

"What do you want me to do about it, Leon? I don't know how you got a hold of me-"

"Dammit-!" he hisses, leaning, drooping, wilting into his palm. She had to look, had to see it for herself and pull her eyes from the dreary scenery for something equally so. The great, stoic Leon Scott Kennedy falling apart under the dim lighting of a restaurant and the perfume of exquisite foods, his plate untouched. For the nature of the meeting, he keeps his tone down to a dull roar. "Look, I just need to talk to you!"

"About _what_?" she snips back, her glare a thousand more words than she's ever said to him. She's hardly ever talked to him, not in a social manner.

He looks at her through his fingers, peering out from the prison. "Ada, please stop."

His hair hangs from his head in messy, bedraggled portions, and his clothes are hardly appropriate for the restaurant; she chalks it up to bad days and sleepless nights. A wrinkled blue dress shirt, no tie to go with it, messily pressed slacks- he looked like he decided his outfit at the last minute. Taking the details in was her job, but it doesn't take an assassin's caliber to see that he is a mess physically and mentally.

"I need your goddamn help. I quit." He grits out, staring at the cold hunk of steak and garnish on his plate. The silence of the dead before, while she ate and he prodded at his food; it was all simply an interim building up to his point. At that moment, his bullet hit her brain. Her eyes are wide, her expression incredulous. He says each word with perfect diction; tone very clear, language understandable but she can't comprehend it at all. The sentence makes absolutely no sense in any context for her.

"_What_? _Why_?"

And then the petty jealousy for the dead friend is gone, shocked out of her. She doesn't understand why or how this happened. He couldn't quit, not him. It couldn't end with the protagonist hanging up his sword and armor… not Leon. Leon was the person that persevered, the good intent that was nearly extinct.

"They're quarantining the US- the entire place has gone _batshit_. Between the riots and the fucking martial law? I didn't sign up to go against my own country-", he breathes like his throat is made of lead. "…everybody's scared."

Evidently this revelation jolts her enough for it to show, one nasty discovery after the other.

"You didn't know…" he says, his full attention on her. "Ada…"

He takes her balled hands in his own, knuckles drawn tight. It's the closest thing to a hug he's ever succeeded at. It's depressing as she lingers, she can damn near sense everything in his head. Absolutely everything. She pulls away before he even has much of a chance to worry for her safety, disregards that moment for the macabre setting outside.

"I'm out of here in a day." She says, casting mist on the glass with her breath. He stares like a statue, hands empty and lifeless on the table. She feels sorry, honestly she does, but she's anxious to leave now.

"What did you want from me, Leon?" She sighs, the raindrops casting shadows on her face. There's a momentary pause where he joins her in observing the weather, just listening and thinking of other things.

"Just… do what you do best." He finally says. "Cause chaos behind the scenes. Heh."

Ada Wong unfolds her hands at last and simply stares at him, a picturesque look if he ever had seen one. He had to pin it as intrigued, curious-

_ Nervous._

"I need a better explanation." She says, quietly.

"Guess I buy you another drink then?" He chances, humor failing him. She frowns. "-or not?"

His hand goes to the pocket of his jacket, digging. "Do you take Visa or Master Card for your services?"

The roll of her eyes answers for her, and she takes to her drink like it would spare her the awful joke.

He draws from his pocket one small, shimmering jewel, a jump drive. She doesn't bother to hide her interest, setting the glass down to give that valuable-looking contraption her full attention. They exchange a look like they're playing a dangerous game of chess, and her curiosity piques and craves clarification for the move.

She hums and plucks it up, weighing it in her palm, caging it between her fingers. "Well thank you for this."

He holds up a finger to stop her. "You don't know what it does."

The purr that escapes her lips is playful. It was a good move on his part, a check to her king. She thumbs the drive, thinking.

"But it's also off book from an anonymous source that I'm not to be meeting." She quips, sighing over the remaining liquid. "It was a good try though."

Leon brushes his characteristic bangs from his eyes and she can see he's not letting up which is both relieving and upsetting. At least he's still willing to fight for something, there's still that stubborn streak.

"Please?" he murmurs in that quiet smooth voice, staring, pleading. "It's worth your time."

She looks him over and her eyes feel suddenly like they're being weighed down by sleepless nights. Memories and a half a lifetime's worth of decisions that she could have made for the better pulled at her lips until she was frowning. If it was anybody else, she would get up and leave.

"Ada, I'm serious." He says, and she looks out the window again, to avoid the look she knows is going to be on his face. It was a deadly risk, everything was at stake, especially now

"I know, Leon. Then you come with me."

He smiles a little, that caustic one of his. "Well I didn't expect to get _that_ far."

She smirks at that, fleeting, and listens to the rain pound into the awnings.

-1-

Her feet kiss puddles; that's how it starts. That's how everything starts though, with a single step or a nudge in the right direction. Her boots sink in gravel and city muck as she walks, the world passing her by in a flurry of wet persons and sopping raincoats. The air tastes like stale cigarettes and dead worms, a musk sticking to her skin and the roof of her mouth, acidic as she swallows down a breath and thinks how long it's been since _her_ last cigarette.

The days were gray and tired, terminal patients choking on swollen clouds and endless rainstorms. People spill into the streets as the lights change; people continue on without a glance to her, masses of colored umbrellas. She hopes today, like she does every day, that the city's problems will stay quiet under the torrential downpour. It's a lot to hope for.

"No." she sighs, squashing her phone between her cheek and shoulder. "I've gotta get to work. Why the hell did you leave your card here in the first place?"

She walks under a metal scaffolding that hasn't budged for years, and it sounds like it's raining quarters above her head. She tries to make out his excuse, but the noise is too much and all she hears is static and thunder.

"- Sorry, what was that? ... Hello?" She looks at the phone and snaps the thing shut as the call drops. "Shit."

Leon's annoyingly illusive these days, and it's making her worry, but she's not surprised. He chose to stand and fight to the bitter end, she chose to leave it as far behind as her mind would allow (which wasn't far enough for anybody).

Jill Valentine, _the_ Jill Valentine plastered over newspaper headlines years ago, thumbs a cigarette from a box in her pocket, and pauses to flick her Zippo out.

She lights it quickly and the first breath feels relieving, the second, stale and dry. It's a bad habit, she knows it is, but it's familiar and numbing, and ironically cathartic to watch the tails of smoke frost her vision. She leans against the wall of some nameless apartment complex and closes her eyes, meditating, calming herself, listening to the rain.

'_It'll probably rain at the funeral too.'_ Her brain says, chewing on the words like rotting rubber bands.

She swings back into step like she's running from something, watching her feet and bursting back into the downpour. The world is in frame by frame, her black old boots are soaked and that familiar headache is coming on, so she takes a gulp of ashes and stale cigarette and holds it in her lungs, marching the last crosswalk and fishing her phone out of her pocket again.

The phone rings and she walks faster, right past the bookstore and through masses of wet people and stagnant puddles.

"Hi... Mr. Haddock? Yeah… It's Jill. Sorry, I woke up sick."

She has the rasp to prove it welling up in her throat. "I'm sorry, I don't think I can come in."

He asks if she wants to be taken to a hospital and she has the urge to let her brain float a little more into a smoky stupor. It's the biological end that was so obvious nobody saw it coming. All her years fighting monsters, and the world was dying because of a flu.

'_A sickening irony?' _she thought, and almost laughed. Almost.

"No, it's just a cold. I'm going to just sleep. Tell the kid I said hi- and thanks."

She hangs up and drags out another breath, celebrating the lie with the crushing of her cigarette into an ash tray and the turn down the alleys, shoes drowning in sludge. She breathes in the sounds of the storm, feels alive for that one moment, and breaks into a run, cold cutting into her face.

-1-

"-wh-whaat's that guy's name?"

"I think it was George… I think…"

The distinction between incredibly sad and empowering was never finer as she leaned back in her chair, vision swimming, listening to two grown individuals who had joined her, discuss "Of Mice and Men" in a rather in-depth drunken tirade. She thinks it's all worth it when the discussion of whether "John or George" was the author's name reaches a climactic high.

There's a naturally smoky, sweaty atmosphere to this club in particular, she likes it because it fills up space and it's tangible and distracting. It's _there_ when she's not. She's a regular in a sense, comes a few times a month, says very little. The long-time bartender recognizes her now as "blue eyes", and knows her poison by now.

She's here, buzzing off of a drink, listening to two grown men in skinny jeans and ugly sweaters talk about classic Steinbeck, or more like argue.

She's pretty sure they knew she wasn't a barfly, drink in one hand, cigarette in the other, and she's pretty sure they're attempting… possibly, to take her home? She stares, lets the smoke curl around her fingers, and deems that she never has good ideas anyways. They weren't handsome, but they were interested, they were amusing.

"The author's John, the character is George." She sighs eventually, interrupting the two. She follows up with a smile and a wave of her hand, almost mystical in the strange blue tinted light.

"Jesus. Oh-you remind me of this one song, you probably have never heard of it-"

She loses connection when they started talking about music, drinks something else with a spicy aftertaste, body on autopilot. She's flitting in an out of her body and her mind, and she can't say which one is worse off; the woman on the outside lighting one of her suitor's foreign cigarettes, or the woman on the inside who doesn't give a fuck who just dangled their car keys in front of her face? She doesn't know who it is that laughs flirtatiously in breaths of cigarette smoke, but it's some creature with the last name "Valentine".

The one turns to her, she can't remember his name, but it's either Leroy or Colin, or… some guy with massive black glasses frames and his hair pulled back… or…

She downs the remainder of the glass.

Somehow she ends up at the counter, laughing, spinning, Colin/Leroy hanging on her. She hasn't any idea which one is kissing her neck, leaving sloppy marks, but the other is holding her arm and pouring drunken anecdotes this way and that. She doesn't know the story, she's laughing anyways.

It's so easy to leave her head behind, let other forces take her, pull her strings so she doesn't have to think, so she does. She closes her eyes and…

She doesn't know who she is, where she is, what is happening. Her head feels heavy all of a sudden, in some shadow of a stop sign (where is she?). She tries to grab it for support, to pause the flash forward time and breathe, because it's hard to and the air suddenly tastes like ash.

"Leroy?" she manages to say, choking on the syllables. No answer, no nothing but the blurring visage of some crowded, chaotic neighborhood street, dappled with blinding lights and grey fog. Her head pounds, she has to kneel in the patch of dead grass to catch the cusp of her reality.

It's a reality that blazes in her ears, loud and screaming. There's a group of blurry figures, scattered and hysterical, somewhere there's a kid wailing. Someone grabs her by the arm, a blur of bright orange, and she's surrounded it feels like.

_ "Get her to an ambulance!"_

"I'm-" she chokes out, and she can't say _fine_, she slurs the first thing she sees. "f-ire? S'that _FIRE_?"

Her body shakes as a deafening crack and a chorus of shrieks pierce her drunken stupor. Something explodes in a huge plume, fire staining a sickly grey sky. Jill can't breathe as someone, not something, runs right past her, _on fire_, howling and crying. She claws at the someone who is carrying her, but her movements are drugged, she can't escape or run or scream.

The someone in orange pulls her up, snares her middle and runs, slinging her over his shoulder. She doesn't know what's going on, she feels like she's having a nightmare.

She can't breathe, she passes out.


End file.
